Privatization of social services: quality differences in Swedish elderly care.

One of the major policy trends in recent decades has been the privatization of social services. This trend has also reached Sweden, a welfare state with health care and social service sectors that previously had almost no private providers. One of the most affected areas is elderly care, i.

Mechanisms behind privatization: a case study of private growth in Swedish elderly care.

For many years the Swedish Welfare State has been associated with a welfare model in which the public sector dominates both the provision and financing of the elderly care system. However, influenced by the ongoing trend of New Public Management, the past 15 years have been characterized by governmental regimes encouraging competition and as a result there has been a substantial increase in private providers. This case study on elderly care in Sweden provides new insights into the mechanisms behind the spread and growth of privatization.

Second-order peak detection for multicomponent high-resolution LC/MS data.

The first step when analyzing multicomponent LC/MS data from complex samples such as biofluid metabolic profiles is to separate the data into information and noise via, for example, peak detection. Due to the complex nature of this type of data, with problems such as alternating backgrounds and differing peak shapes, this can be a very complex task. This paper presents and evaluates a two-dimensional peak detection algorithm based on raw vector-represented LC/MS data.